Book Your Trip Now: 12 Literary Pilgrimages

Many destinations are benefiting from their connection, however tenuous, to a popular work of literature.

1. Bath, England

Despite being dead since 1817, Jane Austen remains one of the most popular writers in the English language. Her works of quiet social satire have inspired countless film adaptations and modernizations, reams of fan fiction (both of the published and of the online variety), and even a weeklong festival in Bath, England, the scene of many an Austen book. Thousands of Austenophiles spend a week in September dressing up as their favorite character from Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice or any of Austen's other works, engaging in Regency era gossip, partaking in country dances, a wedding, and touring the Pump Room.

2. Prince Edward Island, Canada

Prince Edward Island was the idyllic island home of everyone's favorite plucky, if melodramatic, red-haired orphan, Anne Shirley, better known as Anne of Green Gables, as well as, for a time, her creator, Lucy Maude Montgomery. The Anne of Green Gables books remain some of the most popular children's books, selling, over the course of the series century-long life, 50 million copies in 36 different languages.

The 120-mile island still retains much of the pastoral countryside that Montgomery would recognize and is home to a year-round population of only around 135,000. The island has embraced Anne of Green Gables as, if not exactly its raison d'etre, then at least a good part of the reason why some folks visit. For the past four decades, Anne of Green Gables the musical has run every year at the Charlottetown Festival, while the sequel, Anne & Gilbert, began in 2005 and has run every year since. Interestingly, the term "Anne of Green Gables" is a registered trademark owned jointly by the heirs of Montgomery and the Province of Prince Edward Island.

3. King's Cross Station, London and other places in the Muggle world

Ever since Harry Potter took over the world, King's Cross Station hasn't been the same—the fabled depot for the Hogwarts Express really does have a Platform 9 3/4. The mythic platform is tucked away in a passageway between two other platforms, sports half of a rather forlorn luggage trolley sticking out of the wall, and is routinely visited by Muggles with cameras (see photo, yep, that's me).

But that's not the only stop on the Harry Potter tour: This past summer, a tourism company devoted solely to Harry Potter put together a five-day "School of Wizardry" in the Chicago area, involving classes in Divination and Astronomy, a Hogwarts banquet, and even a field trip to Chicago for Harry Potter: The Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry. British tour companies of all stripes have Harry Potter inspired tours through England and Scotland, though it is difficult to parse out book tourism versus movie tourism, since the two very much tend to overlap.

If you want to make your own Harry Potter tour, then check out In Search of Harry Potter by Steve Vander Ark. I can't vouch for its quality, but it seems promising and the folks who bought it, according to Amazon, enjoyed it.

4. The Grail Trail, inspired by The Da Vinci Code

In the months and years after Dan Brown's blockbuster book came out, inspired tourists swarmed the Louvre and Church of Saint-Suplice in Paris, and Westminster Abbey and the Templar Church in London, searching for arcane clues to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail. While these were already big tourist stops to begin with, administrators and operators of the locations noted an upswell in tourists—and that many of them had The Da Vinci Code tucked under their arms. At the height of the book's fame, tour companies were putting together trips and walks inspired by the books, prompting some of these locations to post signs indicating that no, grisly murders and pagan sex rituals were not known to have taken place there:

5. Walden Pond, Massachusetts

Once the site of Henry David Thoreau's misanthropic experiment, Walden Pond—a state park—is a perfectly clear 102-foot deep glacial pond open for swimming. Only 1,000 visitors are allowed in at a time, so while it's not exactly the isolated spot it once was, it's still pretty quiet.

Thoreau only lived at Walden for two years, in a tiny, single-room shack barely large enough for a small bed, a desk, and a chair; in the 155 years since the publication of the book, however, hundreds of thousands of Thoreau pilgrims have visited the site in the hopes of earning the quiet contemplation and spiritual connectedness that Thoreau seemed to have achieved. Once they got there, however, they may have been disappointed: As Thoreau's place in the literary canon became sacrosanct, more and more people packed into the little pond. During the summer of 1952, crowds averaged 35,000 people, who brought with them their cars, hot dog stands, and litter. This prompted Massachusetts to make the site a "reservation" and put strict limits on the number of visitors, allowing the area to revert to a more natural state.

6. Rowan Oak, Faulkner's Mississippi home

More books, papers and articles have been written about Southern writer William Faulkner than any other writer in the English language, excepting, of course Shakespeare. So it stands to reason that there be some tangible monument to his work, a place where Faulkner fans can go to wonder at his genius and study his life. In 1972, they got that place after his daughter sold their family home, Rowan Oak, where Faulkner spent some of his most productive years, to the University of Mississippi. The home, a Greek Revival edifice that pre-dates (and survived) the Civil War, is visited by thousands each year.

7. Barnhill, Jura, Scotland

Barnhill was George Orwell's misty Scottish retreat, far from the city and civilization, where ironically enough, he wrote the claustrophobic classic 1984. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, used the income from his other classic, Animal Farm, to rent a cottage on the small, isolated isle of Jura off the coast of Scotland. It was there, afflicted by the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, that he finished the book. 1984 is still a staple of the high school lit course and in 2009, Queen Elizabeth II made headlines when she presented the visiting president of Mexico with a copy of the dystopian masterpiece, prompting the news media to wonder exactly what she meant by that.

In any case, if reading 1984 wasn't depressing enough, you can immerse yourself in the Orwellian milieu by renting Barnhill for a week—only 8 miles from the nearest telephone and 25 from the nearest pub, the cottage is going for about $780 a week. Provided you can get there, of course.

8. Hemingway's home in Key West, Florida

Ernest Hemingway's Key West home, where he lived from 1931 to 1939 and wrote A Farewell to Arms, is now overrun with polydactyl felines, supposedly the descendants of cats originally owned by Hemingway (a claim refuted by his surviving family). Cats aside, Hemingway did live and write there, did reclaim a urinal from Sloppy Joe's and turn it into a water fountain, and did set up a boxing ring in the front yard. The place is also home to the first swimming pool in Key West, installed by Hemingway's second wife, Pauline.

But truly, the main attraction at this National Historic Landmark is the cats—it's like crazy cat lady colony heaven. There are about 60 cats living at the house, and many of them have either six or seven toes on each foot. They sport names like Spencer Tracy, Archibald MacLeish, Simone de Beauvoir, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein.

9. New Orleans, Louisiana

Despite the fact that Anne Rice has turned her back on vampire lit and instead embraced recreations of the life of Jesus, tourism to the Gothic underside of the city of bourbon, blood and lust blew up after her Vampir Lestat novels hit the bestseller list. New Orleans, with its deep vein of voodoo and Santeria and dark history of slavery and war, took to the influx of vampire tourists with aplomb, even spreading rumors that "vampires" were loose on the streets, slashing the unsuspecting and drinking their blood.

In the 1990s, at the height of her fame, Rice herself organized tours of the city, which then included stops at her first home, at St. Elizabeth's Orphanage (a 93-room former orphanage that Rice bought and renovated) and Lafayette Cemetery.

While Rice has left New Orleans for a gated subdivision out in the suburbs, a number of tours still exist that take their inspiration from Rice's books, with stops at the historic Gallier House, the inspiration for Louis and Lestat's house in Interview with a Vampire, various other Garden District homes, and of course, the cemeteries.

10. Hotel Chelsea, New York

You can get most of your literary tourism out of the way —and some of your musical and modern art tourism, too—with a single, mind-boggling trip to the Hotel Chelsea. For decades, the hotel enjoyed a storied reputation as the haunt of drug addicts, alcoholics, writers, and sometimes all three: Charles Bukowski, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Allen Ginsberg, O. Henry, Jean-Paul Satre and others have all written from there, drank there, argued there, or even died there. Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road there, Charles Jackson of The Lost Weekend committed suicide there, and Sid Vicious woke up to find his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, dead from a stab wound to the stomach there.

11. Oxford, England

Oxford is a Mecca for fantasy fans of all stripes: This college town was the home of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll), and more recently, Phillip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials books. While Oxford's amazing architecture and hushed historical tones are enough of a tourist draw, fantasy fans who want to see where it all began can check out the Museum of Oxford, which is home to several personal artifacts of the real Alice, Alice Liddell; stop for a pint at the Eagle and Child pub, where Tolkien, Lewis, and other members of the Inklings, would sit, talk, and debate theology; visit the place where he wrote The Hobbit and the first two Lord of the Rings books at 20 Northmoor Rd. or leave flowers at Tolkien's grave at the Wolvercote Cemetery; and tour Exeter College, Pullman's alma mater that was transfigured into the Jordan College of the His Dark Materials books.

12. The Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta

The Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta is the three-story Tudor Revival apartment building in Mitchell herself wrote the seminal Southern apologist epic, Gone With The Wind; the whole thing is now a museum dedicated to the author and Southern history, one of Atlanta's most popular tourist attractions.

Mitchell and her husband moved into apartment 1 of the building in 1925; she began writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning book soon after. Gone With the Wind, published in 1936, was immediately a tremendous success and turned into the blockbuster classic film three years later. Mitchell never wrote another novel, although she was for the next few years a very popular figure in Atlanta society; in 1949, however, she was killed by an off-duty cab while she was crossing the street.

Bonus: Trilby, Florida

This entry isn't exactly about a place offering literary tourism now, and it isn't exactly about a place that offered literary tourism then—it's more about the power of fans and the books they love.

When it was published in 1894, Trilby was hugely popular in America. The book, about a young half-French, half-Irish woman named Trilby O'Ferrall who, whilst under the spell of a hypnotist Svengali, transforms from a tone-deaf grisette into famous diva. The Gothic horror romance novel, written by George Du Maurier, whose granddaughter Daphne Du Maurier would practically reinvent the genre with Rebecca, inspired a rabid fandom along the lines of Twilight: Women donned striped skirts like the heroine and harbored romantic notions of the Parisian bohemian lifestyle in the 1850s; families named their pet turkeys after Trilby; people hosted "Trilby" teas and parties; the word "Svengali" became a byword for a person possessing an evil kind of charisma and able to control others around him; and whole towns transformed themselves into a paean to the book.

Well, one town. Trilby, Fla., a tiny collection of storefronts and houses due west of Orlando. At the time, the place was called Macon, but residents of the town soon realized that people and letters directed for Macon, Fla., were being misdirected to the larger and better known Macon, Ga. Not long after the book was published, the president of the railroad line that promised to invigorate the little town decided change its name to Trilby and to name the streets after characters in the book. For awhile, the name change seemed to stimulate interest in the town, if not exactly tourism—riders on the train while passing through would crane their necks out the windows to catch sight of "Svengali Square" and "The Laird Lane." Sadly, in 1925, a fire destroyed much of the budding township and its potential future as a Trilby tourist trap; by that time, however, some of the charm of being named after a book whose popularity was waning was wearing off.
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There are hundreds of thousands of places made famous by their relationships with popular books; what are some of the more weird and out of the way ones that you know of? Any favorites?

Andrew Jackson Davis may not be a prominent figure now, but in the 19th century, he amassed a dedicated following that helped give rise to Spiritualism, a once-popular religion that believed in communicating with the dead. Davis used the teachings of a German doctor named Anton Mesmer to enter trance states that he claimed allowed him to see into space, the afterlife, other worlds, and even the human body. His metaphysical exploits earned him the nickname the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” and while frequently derided by his contemporaries, he inspired at least one well-known American writer: Edgar Allan Poe.

A HUMBLE SHOEMAKER

By all accounts, Davis had a fairly unremarkable childhood. He was born in Blooming Grove, New York, in 1826. His father, a shoemaker, was prone to drink, so Davis and his sister picked up odd jobs to support the family. Most of his schooling came from a then-popular program where teachers taught advanced students, who then taught one another. Ira Armstrong, a shoemaker/merchant he apprenticed under, later recalled that Davis's education “barely amounted to a knowledge of reading, writing and the rudiments of arithmetic.”

In the 1830s, Anton Mesmer’s teachings became popular in America thanks to several impassioned lecturers in New York and New England. Mesmer, who had found fame in Europe in the late 18th century, believed he could use magnets and his own touch to move “magnetic fluids” through the body, healing his patients of everything from the common cold to blindness. Though his theory of animal magnetism, as he called the existence of such fluids, was discredited by the French Academy of Sciences in 1784, medical professionals later became curious about Mesmer’s ability to manipulate his patients into altered mental states. Doctors—conventional or otherwise—studied the phenomenon of mesmerism, traveling across the country to demonstrate their findings.

It’s this mesmerist renaissance that first brought Davis into the public eye. In 1843, a Dr. James Stanley Grimes traveled to Poughkeepsie, New York, advertising his ability to induce trance states. Many Poughkeepsie residents attended the production—including Davis, although he wasn't entranced as advertised. The visit excited the community, especially a tailor and acquaintance of Davis's named William Levingston, who began dabbling in mesmerism himself. One day in early December, Levingston asked if he could mesmerize Davis, and he succeeded where Grimes had failed: Davis, while blindfolded, was able to read a newspaper placed on his forehead, and listed the various diseases of a group of witnesses.

Rumors soon swirled about Davis’s abilities. After that first session, Levingston mesmerized him nearly every day, and hundreds crowded into Levingston’s home to gawk at the spectacle. The sessions followed a pattern: Davis would enter a trance state and diagnose visitors with maladies, and then Levingston would sell remedies. The pair eventually began to travel, taking their show to Connecticut.

Some of Davis’s advice was unorthodox. For deafness, as Davis wrote in his autobiography, The Magic Staff, he once recommended a patient “catch thirty-two weasels ... take off their hind legs at the middle joint, and boil that oil which Nature has deposited in the feet and the parts adjacent thereto.” This preparation, he went on, “must be dropped (one drop at a time) in each ear, twice a day, till the whole is gone—when you will be nearly cured!”

However, Davis swore off parlor tricks in 1844 after he claimed to have teleported 40 miles in his sleep. During the episode, he purportedly spoke with the ghosts of the Greek physician Galen and the Swedish scientist and philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg, who hinted that Davis had a higher purpose. Galen gifted him with a magic staff, although he was not allowed to keep it. The tale mirrored that of Joseph Smith, who around 1827 had claimed a holy messenger guided him to golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written. The year after the teleportation episode, Davis decided to part ways with Levingston, and moved to New York City in the company of Silas Smith Lyon, a doctor, and two Universalist ministers, William Fishbough and Samuel Byron Britton.

There, Lyon placed Davis into trance states several times a day, during which time he would lecture on science and philosophy while also diagnosing patients. Fishbough, meanwhile, would transcribe Davis’s transmissions, which were published as his first book, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelation, and a Voice to Mankind in 1847. Davis combined Spiritualism with utopianism, describing a heaven-like space where all would be welcomed by a Mother and a Father God. Academics of the time soon noticed Davis’s insights were nearly identical to writings that Swedenborg had published years before: Both Davis and Swedenborg claimed to see a spiritual world beyond our own, where all humans could be welcomed into heaven, regardless of religion.

Christian leaders called Davis’s text heretical, while newspapers referred to the book as “ridiculous” and “incomprehensible.” One professor of Greek and Latin at the University of New York said the book was “a work of the devil,” and displayed an “absurd and ridiculous attempt at reasoning.” Joseph McCabe, in his 1920 book Spiritualism: A Popular History from 1847, declared that there was “no need to examine the book seriously” since it contained so many scientific errors. Notably, The Church of New Jerusalem, founded on Swedenborgian ideas, never publicly endorsed Davis’s theories.

Despite this criticism, Davis attracted passionate defenders. George Bush, a Swedenborgian scholar and distant relative of George W. Bush, was among his champions. He insisted that a simple youth like Davis had no access to Swedenborg’s texts and must have been communing with spirits. In 1846, when the French mathematician Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier postulated the existence of the planet Neptune, supporters were quick to write the New York Tribune claiming Davis had already discovered the eighth planet. “As to the asserted fact that this announcement by Mr. Davis was made in March last,” Bush declared, “I can testify that I heard it read at the time; and numerous gentlemen in this city are ready to bear witness that I informed them of the circumstance several months before the intelligence reached us of Le Verrier’s discovery.”

Detractors were just as vocal. When Fishbough admitted to extensively editing Davis's words, a reviewer at the London Athenaeum couldn’t contain his derision: “That a seer ‘commercing’ with the Mysteries of Nature should have needed an editor in this technical sense is remarkable enough," he wrote. "It might have been supposed that the Revelations which brought to an uneducated man the secrets of Science might have brought him grammar, too, to express them in.” Fishbough countered that it would have simply been too much work for Davis to pay attention to such tiny details.

"MARTIN VAN BUREN MAVIS"

Edgar Allan Poe

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

One of the more prominent people occasionally making fun of Davis was Edgar Allan Poe. In the satirical “Mellonta Tauta,” Poe wrote in a preface that “Martin Van Buren Mavis (sometimes called the ‘Toughkeepsie Seer’)” had translated the story—thus poking fun at Davis and his acolytes. Poe also included Davis in his “50 Suggestions,” brief witticisms published in 1849 that took aim at popular beliefs and theorists of the time: “There surely cannot be ‘more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of’ (oh, Andrew Jackson Davis!) ‘in your philosophy,’” Poe wrote.

Yet Davis’s The Principles of Nature may also have inspired the prose poem “Eureka,” in which Poe proposed his theory of the universe. The work has puzzled critics since its inception: Poe’s use of humorous nicknames in the text (he refers to Aristotle as “Aries Tottle”) point to “Eureka” being a satire, but historians have pointed out that several of Poe’s intuitive concepts actually anticipated the study of scientific phenomenon like black holes and the expanding universe.

Several historians have also remarked on the way Davis’s demonstrations in New York influenced Poe’s short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which follows a mesmerist who puts an old man into a trance on his deathbed and watches his body float between life and death. Davis had claimed his trances put him in a state near death, freeing his mind to travel to spiritual realms. In his book Occult America, writer Mitch Horowitz notes that Poe completed the story in New York the year he met Davis. Dawn B. Sova also mentions in Edgar Allan Poe A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work that Poe used his observations of Davis’s trance sessions to complete the story.

For his part, Davis himself seemed somewhat taken with Poe. Of meeting him in 1846, he wrote in Memoranda of Persons, Places and Events, “My sympathies are strangely excited. There are conflicting breathings of commanding power in his mind. But … I saw a perfect shadow of himself in the air in front of him, as though the sun was constantly shining behind and casting shadows before him, causing the singular appearance of one walking into a dark fog produced by himself.”

Charlatan or not, it was an eerie observation to make of a writer who would meet his end three years later.

Davis himself would live a long and rich life. He continued to lecture and write books until the 1880s, doing away with his scribe for later publications. He then earned a traditional medical license and moved to Boston, serving as a physician until his death in 1910. Though he sought to distance himself from the spectacle of spiritualism later on in life, Davis’s humble background and curious rise to fame made the “Poughkeepsie Seer” one of the movement’s most notable figures—and one who still maintains a strange resonance today.

A tale of love and loss, sisterhood and trauma, Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 novel The Secret Life of Bees has won the hearts of millions of readers around the world. But few know the full truth behind this inspirational novel.

1. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES IS A BILDUNGSROMAN.

A bildungsroman is a novel that charts the moral or psychological growth of its protagonist. It's also known as a coming-of-age story. In this case, Kidd's novel follows the journey of its narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Lily Melissa Owens. After escaping her abusive father T. Ray, Lily finds solace with the beekeeping Boatwright sisters, and confronts the terrible truth about her mother's death.

2. THE NOVEL TACKLES RACE RELATIONS IN THE 1960S.

Set in South Carolina during the civil rights movement, The Secret Life of Bees presents examples of overt racism. In one scene, a trio of white men harasses Lily's mother-figure Rosaleen Daise, who is black. At the same time, the novel challenges pernicious racial stereotypes. Before meeting the Boatwrights, Lily, who is white, assumes all black women are uneducated laborers or maids like Rosaleen. Through her time with the sisters, who are accomplished business owners, the novel's heroine recognizes her own prejudices, and grows to realize her ignorance.

3. ASPECTS OF LILY'S CHILDHOOD MIRRORED KIDD'S OWN.

Upon the novel's 10th anniversary, Kidd offered a long list of autobiographical elements that can be found within The Secret Life of Bees. "Both Lily and I were adolescents during the summer of 1964, and like Lily, I was powerfully affected by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the racial unrest that fomented during those hot, volatile months," she wrote on her website. "I, too, had an African-American caretaker. I, too, wanted to be a writer ... Lily and I created fallout shelter models for our 7th-grade science projects and wrote papers called 'My Philosophy of Life' before either of us were old enough to have a philosophy." Kidd clarifies, however, that she did not lose her mother when she was a child and her father was "nothing like T. Ray."

4. KIDD VISITED HONEYHOUSES AND BEEHIVES WHEN SHE WAS WRITING THE NOVEL.

"Some of those scenes where Lily is experiencing that rush of feeling and emotion when the bees come swirling out of their hives, I could never have gotten that from a book," the author told BookPage. "The fear and delight of all that and the sounds of it … the way your feet stick to the floor in a honeyhouse … the senses are alive in all of that experience."

5. BEES WERE A BIG PART OF KIDD'S CHILDHOOD.

In one way, Kidd lived in a honeyhouse of her own. "When I was growing up, bees lived inside a wall of our house, an entire hive-full of them—that is to say, 50,000 or so. They lived with us, not for a summer or two, but for 18 years," Kidd wrote on her website. "The room vibrated with bee hum. At times, the whole house seemed to hum. I remember my mother cleaning up the honey that leaked from the cracks and made tiny puddles on the floor. Being a good Southern family, we normalized the situation and went on with our lives."

6. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES WAS KIDD'S FIRST NOVEL, BUT NOT HER FIRST BOOK.

7. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES HAS A SPIRITUAL CONNECTION TO KIDD'S EARLIER BOOKS.

The novel includes Christian iconography, notably the Black Madonna that adorns the Boatwrights' honey jars. Its coming-of-age plot also touches on spiritual awakening. As Kidd said in the 2002 interview with BookPage, "I think of it as something deeper and more profound happening to [Lily] at the level of soul, and I wanted her to have a real transformation and a real awakening … to this other realm."

8. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES'S MEMORABLE MARY FIGUREHEAD WAS BASED ON A REAL ONE IN A MUSEUM.

In the novel, a religious service is held before a statue called Black Mary or Our Lady of Chains, which is the figurehead of a ship that carries a great significance to the Daughters of Mary, a group of women who follow a religion invented by August Boatwright. Kidd had seen a similar figurehead while visiting a Trappist monastery in South Carolina. "The day that I discovered her," Kidd said, "I was totally captivated by … the powerful imagery of this [figurehead] Mary that was surfacing from the deep, washing up from the deep, onto the shores of consciousness, so to speak."

9. THE BOATWRIGHT SISTERS REPRESENT A CELEBRATION OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIP AND SORORITY.

On her website, Kidd tells the story of how she came up with the Boatwright sisters' characters and setting. She had woken up in the middle of the night thinking about where Rosaleen and Lily were going to end up after escaping T. Ray. She picked up a selection of photos that she had hoped would spark creativity. "My eyes wandered back and forth between pictures of three African-American women, an uproariously pink house, a cloud of bees, and a black Mary, and suddenly, it fell in one unbroken piece into my head," she wrote. "My two runaways would escape to the home of three black sisters, who live in a pink house, keep bees, and revere a black Mary. This sudden revelation may have happened in part because down deep I wanted a way to write about the strength, wisdom, and bonds of women."

10. KIDD WAS INSPIRED BY TWO CLASSICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

The Secret Life of Bees won applause for its insightful look into the inner lives of its female characters. It may be no surprise that its author says reading the groundbreaking feminist novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, published in 1899, made a big impact on her. Kidd also cites Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the 1854 transcendentalist treatise on simplicity and self-reliance. When she read each book, Kidd told Scholastic, "I would say they were turning points in my life, but also I can look back and say they affected me deeply as a writer."

11. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES WAS A RUNAWAY HIT.

The novel spent more than two-and-a-half years on The New York Times bestseller list and more than 8 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. It has also been translated into 36 languages.

12. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES ALSO EARNED CRITICAL ACCLAIM.

Many reviewers praised Kidd's beautifully rendered characters and setting. "Lily is a wonderfully petulant and self-absorbed adolescent, and Kidd deftly portrays her sense of injustice as it expands to accommodate broader social evils," The New York Times Book Reviewwrote. "August and her sisters, June and May, are no mere vehicles for Lily's salvation; they are individuals as fully imagined as the sweltering, kudzu-carpeted landscape that surrounds them."

In deeming the novel "buzz-worthy," Peoplewrote, "populated with rich, believable characters and propelled by a swiftly paced plot, this debut novel is a cut above most coming-of-age tales."

The Secret Life of Bees was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2002, and won the American Booksellers Association's Book Sense Paperback of the Year award in 2004.

13. THE NOVEL WAS MADE INTO A STAR-STUDDED MOVIE.

Gina Prince-Bythewood, who wrote and directed Love & Basketball and other features, adaptedThe Secret Life Of Bees into a period drama. The cast included Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, Oscar nominees Queen Latifah and Sophie Okonedo, multiple Grammy winner Alicia Keys, and Dakota Fanning as Lily.

Kidd visited the film set in a tiny North Carolina town and marveled at how every detail of the production was just as she had imagined it. But months later, when she sat down in the movie theater to watch the film for the first time, she felt nervous. "I had no idea what I would see. I’d glibly said that handing over my novel to Hollywood had seemed like leaping out of an airplane, but sitting there waiting for the film to begin, it really did seem that way," Kidd wrote on her website. "The parachute opened, thankfully, and the whole thing floated rather nicely to earth."

14. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES HAS BEEN ADAPTED INTO A STAGE MUSICAL.

As part of Vassar College's Powerhouse Theater's summer season in 2017, the college and New York Stage and Film presented a workshop production of The Secret Life of Bees as a musical, which starred Orange is the New Black standout Uzo Aduba in the role of Rosaleen. The show featured music from Tony winner Duncan Sheik and a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage.

15. KIDD REALIZED THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES WAS BIG WHEN IT WAS FEATURED ON JEOPARDY!.

Under the category "Women Writers," the long-running quiz show offered this answer: “Sue Monk Kidd’s debut novel is about these insects.” Kidd recalled that moment on her website: "I blinked at the television. Finally, I came to life and shouted, 'What are bees?' Fortunately, the contestant did not need my help."